Continuing our studies on the Evolution of communication and music (see last weeks blog), we were able to observe the emergence of discrete symbols in simulated communications between two participants.
Learning progress from chaos to self-organisation. Two simulated participants, A and B, communicate: A sings a tone (sign) to communicate a specific location in the world to B. B then tries to correctly interpret which location A meant. Each of the 10.000 lines above corresponds to such an act of communication. Over time, both participants try to improve their choice of signs and interpretations. Initially, communication is very chaotic (left) but through self-organisation (left to right), the participants learn to establish a convention, which allows them to successfully communicate efficiently by following a shared convention (right).Using a slightly more complex setup, we were able to observe the emergence of discrete symbols. If the world consists of two separate regions (two lines in the x-y-plane) these are covered by distinct parts of the sign space (e.g. low tones for one line, high tones for the other). Moreover, if the two regions of the world are equally important (left scenario) the signs are divided equally between them. If, however, one region is less important (right scenario), only a single sign is used to refer to that unimportant region. In contrast, almost all signs are used to communicate details within the other, more important region. Again, this is learned in a fully self-organised process that leads to an efficient convention for communication.
